“Oh, my God!” my friend Shanti screams, so loudly that I have to hold the phone an inch from my ear. “You have to come to ‘Gathering of the Goddesses’ with me. There are going to be so many cool women from the snowboarding industry there! You just have to!”
Shanti is a friend and fellow writer who, for the past 10 years, has been one of the only other women I know who has braved the male-dominated world of action sports, writing about surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding and any other high-flying sport you might see featured in a Mountain Dew commercial.
“Thanks, but I think I have something going on that weekend,” I’d lie. It was easier to make up excuses than to get into the same old argument.
Shanti and I met in 1995 when we were hired at the same time to be the first female editors at Transworld Snowboarding magazine. Her response to our debut among the male-
dominated staff was to go in with all guns firing, an updated cry of “I am woman, hear me roar,” while mine was to sit quietly in the corner and hope no one noticed me.
I didn’t want to fight an uphill battle, and I definitely didn’t want anything to do with these all-women’s events. It was just a reminder there were all these other women struggling to find their way in sports where they weren’t always welcome. I had more of a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” kind of attitude. Besides, I like men. But what I didn’t realize at the time was, it was an uphill battle no matter how I chose to deal with it.
After Transworld, Shanti and I went on to a series of other media-related jobs that were different but exactly the same, jobs that brought us to the same places with the same people year after year, this microcosm of action sports and all the events, parties, contests and strange people that go along with it.
People often got us confused, identifying us only as “that writer girl” but not knowing who was who. That always drove me crazy because even though we are both nice Jewish girls with prep school educations, journalism degrees and bylines in a lot of the same magazines, we really are nothing alike.
Ultimately what sets Shanti and I apart is our work ethic and style. She always came out of the gate charging while I preferred to step aside and wait for the herd to pass. I always sat back and let opportunities arise, since one job always seemed to lead to the next. She goes after it, hitting the pavement – literally – in places such as L.A. and New York, where she would call editors from her cellphone and say subtle things like, “I’m on the sidewalk outside your office and I’d like to come up and see you now.” That’s how she got her foot in the door at men’s magazines such as FHM, Men’s Journal and Men’s Fitness, as well as a slew of women’s rags such as Self, Glamour and many others.
So it really doesn’t surprise me that Shanti has written her first book – “Women Who Run” – profiling women who found inspiration through running, including Colorado runners Diane Van Deren, a 45-year-old ultra-
marathoner and epileptic athlete from Sedalia who ran the four 100-mile races in 2005 (the Bighorn 100, the Bear Trail 100, the Leadville 100 and the Hardrock 100) and Vail’s Anita Ortiz, who at 40 was ranked the No. 1 masters trail runner in the world and won her category in the Pikes Peak Ascent four times.
It also doesn’t surprise me that during her research, Shanti traveled to Colorado and accompanied Van Deren for a 17-mile run at 4:30 in the morning. “I came back to the house at like 8 in the morning when the kids were just waking up and just collapsed,” Shanti recalls. “Her daughter was like, ‘Yep, that’s why I don’t go running with my mom. She’s crazy!’ I almost died, I was totally worked.”
With a little maturity and hindsight, I’m not so opposed to the “woman thing” as I once was. I also think it’s fitting and appropriate Shanti has devoted an entire book to women who charge as hard as she does. I have no doubt readers will be inspired to do the same, even if it means simply getting off the couch, throwing on a pair of running shoes, and putting one foot in front of the other.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley
can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
